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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#30: "I'll Never Be Normal."
Finally, the finale to the Mount Normal Trilogy. I no longer believe I'm fundamentally broken, nor that it's possible to be normal, so we make it to the conclusion and find out that in so many, many ways, I actually am quite normal. Despite my long-standing belief that I would never be normal.
( But, once again, how do you define normal? )
While I might believe that I'll never be normal, that's certainly not the case, and one of the joys of my life is that I keep finding people for whom what I have thought of as strange, weird, or even deviant is perfectly normal to them. By having an expanded perspective on where the boundaries of human interaction and action and all the rest are, it allows me to feel much more in the pocket and the bell curve, even in the wider society. Admittedly, I don't want to lose my weird status completely, because I've built a lot of my identity around being someone who isn't normal in all of my aspects, but I want it to be normal weird rather than the kind of weird that I've been made fun of (or nearly fired for), the kind that's quirky and eccentric, rather than the kind that's toxic or seen as moral failures and unacceptable. I've had enough of being singled out for being weird and being told that I'm not okay behind my back and also to my face. So while I may never summit Mount Normal fully, there's definitely a place for me and a whole bunch of other wonderful weirdos along the way.
#30: "I'll Never Be Normal."
Finally, the finale to the Mount Normal Trilogy. I no longer believe I'm fundamentally broken, nor that it's possible to be normal, so we make it to the conclusion and find out that in so many, many ways, I actually am quite normal. Despite my long-standing belief that I would never be normal.
( But, once again, how do you define normal? )
While I might believe that I'll never be normal, that's certainly not the case, and one of the joys of my life is that I keep finding people for whom what I have thought of as strange, weird, or even deviant is perfectly normal to them. By having an expanded perspective on where the boundaries of human interaction and action and all the rest are, it allows me to feel much more in the pocket and the bell curve, even in the wider society. Admittedly, I don't want to lose my weird status completely, because I've built a lot of my identity around being someone who isn't normal in all of my aspects, but I want it to be normal weird rather than the kind of weird that I've been made fun of (or nearly fired for), the kind that's quirky and eccentric, rather than the kind that's toxic or seen as moral failures and unacceptable. I've had enough of being singled out for being weird and being told that I'm not okay behind my back and also to my face. So while I may never summit Mount Normal fully, there's definitely a place for me and a whole bunch of other wonderful weirdos along the way.
